At the end of last year my friend encouraged me to think about releasing some music as a token. On Feb 17, 2022, I did that.
DeSante Records was released along with an EP that I made called “We Love You”. It is based on the ERC-721 token, but it has some notable differences. I will write more about the ERC-721J token in another article, it can be used in many ways. The most important things to note are that the tokens are created as a 1/1, and that for more copies to exist they have to be minted by a wallet that already holds the token. It is an NFT version of copying a tape or disc. Collectible tapes. You can also think of it as a pay it forward minting mechanic.
What happened after my friend convinced me to make tokens was lots of thinking and conversations about edition size, and coming to the conclusion that I feel most comfortable if there was a dynamic edition size for my music. At some point in here I learned solidity with some good direction to good tutorials like those from Austin Griffith and Scaffold-Eth. Along the way I also decided that an original, or master copy, is also a very important idea when making an NFT of a song. If you think of one song as a thing you made, it is one song, the answer is right there. Original copies make so much sense for this type of creation. Just like IRL music duplication, there are copies that are derived from a master copy.
For each original copy of a song I make on my smart contract, there is a 100 maximum amount of copies that can be made. It costs 0.05 ether to mint a copy, and you need to hold a token of the song you’re making a copy of. The original copy has it’s own rarity “Genesis” (of course), and 2 more rarities. Serial #2–10 of every song are “First Edition” and serial #11–100 are “Special Edition”. The Genesis copies of this first release are all clean, the 1st Edition has one cassette icon, and the Special Editions have 2 cassette icons.
This has led to fun things like copy trading, where two friends make copies for each other, or selective collecting where someone wants to collect the songs in a particular order, or liquidity copies where you make some copies for possible secondary sale. I’d like to thank my NFT buddies in the Bored Ape discord and Bored to Death for being my NFT buddies, encouraging me to grow and making me want to code this token just to make copies of my songs and give them to you.
Now my friends who make great music are going to let me collect their music as tokens too! This is just the beginning!